Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, referred to through the rest of the novel as the Counselor, is an itinerant preacher who travels the backlands of the Brazilian state of Bahia. He chastises listeners about the disrepair into which their religious buildings have fallen, makes enigmatic prophecies, and predicts that the world will end in a few decades’ time, in the year 1900. In preparation, the churches and cemeteries must be restored. The poor inhabitants of the backlands, the sertanejos, impressed by his charisma, start to follow him and grant him the nickname by which he will come to be known throughout the country.

Years later, Galileo Gall, a Scottish anarchist and stranger in Salvador, attempts to place an ad in the Journal de Noticías inviting “[a]ll lovers of justice” to a demonstration in support of Canudos (7). This is the community the Counselor has established, a group of thousands of sertanejos living free from government control in a secluded part of Bahia. The editor, Epaminondas Gonçalves, rejects it. In the office while they meet is a high-voiced, nearsighted journalist who will become one of the novel’s major characters. Gall is a phrenologist—a practitioner of the now debunked pseudoscience of assessing people’s personalities by the shape of their skulls.